Beyond the Blue Ring

“The opportunity to ride a camel doesn’t come to everyone.”

—Excerpt from a letter written to me by my grandfather in 1968

I remember that ride. The camel’s high barnyard smell and lashed indifferent eye. The pity for which I had no words. The sick swaying when we began to move slowly around the perimeter of the small blue ring set up at the Brooklyn street fair. The boat-like list of the double saddle in which I sat with another little girl— one on either side of the bony twitchy hump in which the camel stored extra water for long walks across the desert.

Even at four I could tell that the camel keeper with his ratty turban and drooping whip had no plans to travel beyond the blue ring.

My father must have told his father about the ride during one of their Sunday phone calls. The distance between New York City and rural Minnesota in 1968 was one over which an appendage filled with spare water might well have come in handy.

Instead there were my grandfather’s cautiously typed letters addressed to me, tapering off over the successive years to my annual birthday card with a ten dollar bill tucked in and the adjuration not to spend it all in one place.

Reading the old letters now, I see they were composed less for me than for my father—full of coy advice: Anne, don’tlet your dad crowd you outof your room with books, or tell your dad it’s time to getbehind OUR president.

After all, at that age and that distance I could have been no more to him than a small blond blank. But I choose to believe the line about the camel was really meant for me— the stranger that by then he knew I would become.